Early Autumn Blooms

My garden, though still beautiful, is approaching fall and winter mode. There are less blossoms there although some flowers still put on quite a show - the pineapple sage whose bright red flowers always transport me in a good mood. Or the cosmos - like the one in the photo above. These flowers came up from seeds that I scattered randomly without any concern where they fell down or where the wind would carry them. These pink ones settled at the rounded corner where they mingle with the Mexican sage - purple, white, magenta and pink! It's a true feast of bright colors. The cosmos are very tall and one afternoon when the sun was already in the west and slowly descending to the horizon I noticed how wonderful this flower glowed against the background of the trees across the street. I couldn't resist and ran inside to grab my camera to capture this special moment. It was the light that did the trick of course.

I layered the photo with Kim's texture "artjoytexture" in blending mode soft light at 100%; then I imported it to Lightroom and played with it. I'm usually not a huge fan of really bright and bold colors to an extreme, but I made an exception here. I'm still a beginner with the new Lightroom. I used Lightroom 2 quite a bit when I had scanned my slides and organized them there. But now I have Lightroom 5 and there is a lot more going on. I hope I'll get the hang of it!

I'm linking to Kim's Texture Tuesday today.

My Feet and the Fire Wave

This week's challenge at Inspiration Avenue, "Looking down at your feet", goes so well with some photos of the Valley of Fire that I wanted to show you. As you know, we went to the Valley of Fire in Nevada during Thanksgiving week. Before we went there, I had seen pictures of one part of this area that really fascinated me. I had no idea what it was called or where exactly it was located in the State Park. I couldn't find it on the map of the park. So we just tried to find it.

We were successful in the later afternoon, when the sun was already rather low in the sky. I found a sign for the "Fire Wave" and beneath it was an image of the place I was looking for. It involved a 20 - 30 minutes hike through rough terrain. No question that we made that hike - and we saw the Fire Wave in the slowly setting sun which brought out the colors of this rock formation even more.

This is where my feet come in - here you can see my hiking booted feet just above the Fire Wave:

Here is the photo of the Fire Wave without my feet - there are many pictures of it on the Internet with way more intense colors, but I wonder how much Photoshop and similar photo editing software contributed to those colors. This is what it looked like while we were there:

It's pretty incredible, right? The different colors of the layers are fascinating, and if I knew more about geology I could probably tell you here why this is so. However, I just enjoyed this sight.

This is the view to the other side (behind me) - not quite as spectacular, but still very beautiful.